What actually makes you senior

What actually makes you senior
3 minutes by Matheus Lima

Senior engineers excel at reducing ambiguity rather than just technical skills. While mid-level engineers handle well-defined problems effectively, senior engineers tackle fuzzy requirements by asking the right questions and separating important issues from noise. They turn unclear project demands into concrete, actionable plans. This skill prevents project risks and creates smoother execution, even though the work often goes unnoticed.

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Using Outlook as build pipeline
5 minutes by Unknows

A developer automated a tedious file transfer process between teammates by creating a Python script that monitors email for attachments and uploads them to a server. The solution involved one person sending files via email and a script checking the inbox every minute to process them automatically. While unconventional, this workaround eliminated manual file transfers and reduced testing delays when proper server access took weeks to obtain.

Becoming unblockable
10 minutes by Sean Goedecke

Engineers can avoid getting blocked on projects by working on multiple tasks at once. When one task hits a roadblock, they can switch to another and keep making progress. Sean says other key strategies include fixing developer environment problems quickly, investigating issues in unfamiliar code yourself, and building relationships with engineers on different teams.

Making Crash Bandicoot
less than a minute by Andy Gavin

A co-creator of Crash Bandicoot, Andy Gavin, writes a series of posts about making the popular video game character where he shares behind-the-scenes stories about developing the orange marsupial.

The performance inequality gap
23 minutes by Alex Russell

Most of the world's computing happens on devices that are older and slower than anything on a developer's desk, and connected via networks that contemporary “full-stack” developers don't emulate. Web developers almost never personally experience these constraints. Here's a research based suggestion on using test devices and network constraints.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Bloom filters: The niche trick behind a 16× faster API